Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800, this symposium brings together historians of food, culture, and print to further explore the themes of performance on and around the table. Talks will consider English coronation feasts, German court carvers, musical accompaniments to dining, and more. Evelyn Lincoln will join exhibition curator Deborah L. Krohn and the speakers for a discussion following the presentations.

Schedule
1:30 pm
Deborah L. Krohn (Bard Graduate Center)
Welcome and Introduction

1:45 pm
Ivan Day (Food Historian)
Dillegrout and Puffins Cold: The Role of Emblem and Ritual in British Coronation Feasts

2:30 pm
Molly Taylor-Poleskey (Middle Tennessee State University)
The Carver in the Archive: What German Court Records Tell Us about the Practice of the Trancier’s Art

3:10 pm
Coffee Break

3:30 pm
Elizabeth Weinfield (Juilliard School)
Music at the Table: The Viol, Literacy, and Dining in the Early Modern World

4 pm
Evelyn Lincoln (Brown University)
Reflections

4:15 pm
Roundtable and Q&A


4:45 pm
Reception
Bios
Ivan Day is an independent historian of the social history and culture of food. He is celebrated for his reconstructions of historical table settings, which combine museum objects with accurate recreations of period dishes. His work has been exhibited in many major museums in the UK, Europe, and North America, including the Getty Research Institute, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gardiner Museum, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is an old friend of BGC’s and in 2007 worked on a recreation of an Imperial table featuring a Meissen Parnassus by Johann Joachim Kändler for the exhibition Fragile Diplomacy.

Deborah L. Krohn
teaches early modern decorative arts and cultural history at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where she is associate professor. She holds a BA and MA from Princeton University, and a PhD from Harvard University. She has published widely on Renaissance art and material culture, the history of collecting, and culinary history, including Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 (2023) and Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens (2015). As a curator, she has collaborated on exhibitions including Salvaging the Past: French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013, BGC), Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick (2009, BGC), Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008-9, Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Evelyn Lincoln is professor of the history of art and architecture and Italian studies at Brown University. She has written about the origins and development of printmaking as a career and the role of illustration in promoting the immersive reading of instructional books in dialogue form. She is currently writing a book about the Parasole family of woodblock carvers, printers, publishers, and painters in early modern Rome. She also teaches a course, Dreaming of Food in the Early Modern World, on visual responses to the human activities of preparing, thinking about, and possibly eating food.

Molly Taylor-Poleskey is an early modern European cultural historian and associate professor of digital history at Middle Tennessee State University. Her first book, Food and Culture at the Court of the Great Elector, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. Her German History article, “A Baker, the Great Elector and Prussian Statebuilding: Territorial Integration in the Everyday,” won the German History Society’s article prize. Among her latest endeavors are the Digital Holy Roman Empire, a mapping project, and Hidden Town in 3D, an augmented reality project in collaboration with MTSU’s animation department and Old Salem Museums and Gardens in North Carolina.

Elizabeth Weinfield is a professor of musicology at the Juilliard School. Her research explores the relationships among gender, performance, and material culture in the early modern period. She holds a PhD in historical musicology from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Master of Music from Oxford. As artistic director of the ensemble Sonnambula (recently ensemble-in-residence at the Met Cloisters), she has designed site-specific concerts at museums around the country. Her recording of the music of seventeenth-century composer, Leonora Duarte, on Centaur Records won the American Musicological Society’s Jewish studies award in 2019. She is working on her first book, a monograph on Duarte that investigates music’s role in the convergence of business and culture in the early modern domestic space.

Credits
This program was organized in conjunction with the spring 2023 exhibition Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800.

Support for the exhibition is generously provided by The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and Joseph S. Piropato with additional support by Cafaro Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, and Suzanne Slesin and Michael Steinberg, as well as donors to Bard Graduate Center.